


bite that hand so badly

by wrishwrosh



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: 2018-2019 NHL Season, Breaking Up & Making Up, Character Study, Gluten Alternatives, M/M, embarrassing sex injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2020-07-09 01:01:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19878997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wrishwrosh/pseuds/wrishwrosh
Summary: “I don’t get it,” Gabe says. “This is easy. You’re the one making this hard.”“Story of my life,” says Tyson.





	bite that hand so badly

**Author's Note:**

> i'm wayyyyy too slow of a writer to cope with trades so here we are!! happy birthday tyson, this was supposed to be done in march. one million billion thanks to my beta who inspired me to actually do something other than impulsively publish my first draft, for once
> 
> title from radio, radio by elvis costello

Tyson is, at this point in his life, comfortable with the idea that he’s pretty much never going to make any good decisions. It’s just not really who he is as a person. If he was that person who made good choices, he wouldn’t currently be on his knees in the shower in Gabe’s guest bathroom. Not even the master, but such is Tyson’s life. Old habits are hard to break, and even if they’re dating now instead of just hooking up, there’s a routine to be followed.

He’s giving the best blowjob he can, given that Gabe keeps shifting his weight a tiny bit so that the spray keeps getting in Tyson’s face. It’s going decently. Tyson has about half his brain on the problem of how to shuffle so he can stop getting water in his eyes and the other half on Gabe’s dick, which is a decent ratio in his opinion. Gabe groans, tapping Tyson’s cheek. Tyson takes the signal and leans back, wiping water out of his eyes a little pointedly. Gabe hauls Tyson up off the shower floor, clearly angling for the kind of sloppy makeout he likes right before he comes. He hoists Tyson’s thigh around his waist, bracing against the shower wall with his other hand, and Tyson is just reaching for his dick when Gabe yanks his thigh up a little too far and his other foot slips.

Even Gabe’s guest bathroom has the kind of fancy shower with a half-dozen knobs and handles and extra faucets, for what Tyson doesn’t know. Probably alternating jets or sauna steam or summoning a personal masseuse. What Tyson does know is that it hurts like a bitch to fall eyebrow-first into one of those random extraneous showerheads. 

“Haagh,” says Tyson. The showerhead clatters out of its little holster to the shower floor, and Tyson tips sideways into the tile, a little stunned.

“Oh, shit,” says Gabe, gingerly reaching towards Tyson’s face. “Shit, should I call the trainers? Should I take you to urgent care or something?”

Tyson smacks his hand away. “God, don’t you fucking dare.” The water’s getting cold, and his eye hurts like a bitch, and he didn’t even get off. That last part probably isn’t even on the table anymore, given the way Gabe leaps out of the shower.

For a moment, it’s like Tyson isn’t even in his body anymore. The sharp ache radiating out of his eyebrow blurs into the rest of his face. The rushing of the shower turns everything else into a weird sensory soup. But then his arm reaches out and turns off the shower, and the room goes dead fucking silent, and he’s back. This is not happening to someone else. It’s happening to him, Tyson.

From the other room, Gabe yells, “I feel like I have to call somebody.”

“You’re not going to do that,” says Tyson, stepping out of the shower. He finds his shirt, crumpled up and sort of wet next to the bath mat. One of them must have kicked it into a puddle. 

His pants are nowhere to be seen, but right now he’ll take what he can get in the pursuit of no longer being naked. He pulls his shirt over his head, even though he’s still soaking wet and he has to wrestle it over his chest.

“Honestly, Tys, you’re hurt.” Gabe says. He comes back into the bathroom clutching his phone, completely naked and still dripping. “What if you have a concussion, or something?” He probably got water all over the carpet, the asshole. If Tyson didn’t still avoid spending the night at Gabe’s, he might be mad about that. As it is, he still feels too weird about being in Gabe’s space for an extended amount of time, and water on the carpet is not his problem.

“I’m not concussed.” Tyson rolls his eyes, mostly just to test if it hurts. It doesn’t, but raising his eyebrows does.

Gabe is too naked for Tyson’s liking right now. Tyson pulls a towel off the rack and launches it at Gabe. He half-imagines some satisfying slapstick thing where it smacks Gabe in the face, but the towel is dry and he didn’t ball it up enough, so it just flutters to the floor at Gabe’s feet. Gabe scoops it up, sneering at Tyson. Then he must remember that not three minutes ago he accidentally dropped Tyson eyebrow-first into a detachable shower head, and so he ducks and knots the towel around his waist. He offers Tyson a googly-eyed look that’s probably supposed to be supportive or concerned, but Tyson simply does not have it in him to deal Gabe’s feelings right now. His face fucking aches.

“Does it hurt?” Gabe asks, reaching out again like he thinks Tyson is going to let him touch it. 

Tyson swats his hand out of the air. “Obviously it hurts.” This isn’t a play-through-the-pain situation, and Tyson isn’t particularly inclined to make Gabe feel any better about what happened. He’s prepared to bitch about this until he dies.

Tyson turns to the mirror. There’s Gabe, toned and waxed and glistening in the shitty over-bright bathroom fluorescents, looking like a Roman statue in a towel instead of a toga. And there’s Tyson next to him, damp and square with his shirt on backwards and his dick out. A welt is already rising on his eyebrow. Tyson just looks at the two of them for a minute. The bathroom fan drones in the background. His stomach sinks.

“I just don’t think it’s safe to rule out a concussion,” Gabe says in his most obnoxious press-conference captain voice. Tyson doesn’t want to be motivated. He doesn’t want to take these issues seriously. He never wants to think about these issues ever again. 

Gabe’s staring at Tyson in the mirror. Tyson darts his eyes away from mirror-Gabe’s gaze. “Stop it, Gabe,” Tyson says. “I’ll be fine for practice tomorrow.” He grabs a hand towel and starts furiously drying his thighs. There’s a regular adult sized towel on the rack, but he’d have to reach past Gabe to get it. 

“For practice?” Gabe asks, sounding lost. Tyson doesn’t want to look at mirror-Gabe or real Gabe anymore. He bends over to dry his calves, and it doesn’t make his face hurt any worse. He elects to take that as a good enough sign.

“Yeah, I’ll see you tomorrow,” Tyson says. His pants are really nowhere in the bathroom, even though he could swear neither of them got naked until the shower was already on. He’s going to have to Winnie-the-Pooh it through Gabe’s stupid sleek house looking for his joggers. Tyson’s dignity has taken worse blows in the past, but for some reason this one really stings.

“Tomorrow?” says Gabe, who evidently turned into a parrot during the time Tyson hasn’t been looking at him.

“Yup. I’m going to leave and go back to my house, and once I’m there I’m gonna call the trainers myself and tell them I tripped, and they’ll tell me I’m fine.”

“That’s stupid.”

“Obviously it’s stupid,” Tyson says. “This whole thing is really, really stupid.” He touches his eyebrow with one gentle finger. Unsurprisingly, that hurts. He’ll definitely bruise, maybe even get a black eye. At least it didn’t break the skin, which is an absolutely minuscule blessing.

“What are you going to tell them you tripped over?” Gabe asks. Gabe is a terrible liar, always desperate for an over-prepared alibi. Tyson isn’t necessarily better at lying, but years of saying whatever incredibly dumb shit pops into his head has given him a better idea of how little people actually care about the words that come out of his mouth. The more wild shit you say, the less anyone actually pays attention to any of it. 

He shrugs. “Doesn’t matter,” he says. “I’ll come up with something if they ask.”

Gabe sputters, clutching at his towel.

“Where are my pants?” Tyson asks.

+

When Tyson gets home from Gabe’s, eyebrow throbbing unpleasantly, all he wants in the world is pumpkin bread. It’s not a remotely seasonal desire, given that it’s almost February and pumpkin has been out of the stores for months. But the heart wants what it wants, and Tyson’s stupid heart wants pumpkin bread with chocolate chips. Chocolate chunks, even, if he can have them. Tyson digs into his pantry with hope in his heart. Blessedly, there’s a dusty can of leftover pumpkin hidden way in the back, so he won’t need to go make a fool of himself at King Sooper’s.

Normally Tyson could whip up a batch of pumpkin bread batter in an easy fifteen. His stand mixer was probably the third thing he bought for his house after the selzer machine and the foosball table that turns into a pool table, and it has horsepower. But tonight Tyson’s working through something, so he’ll be mixing by hand.

He considers using a whisk, but that’ll be a bitch to clean and he’s not particularly interested in making his life harder in that particular way this evening. Instead he gets out a wooden spoon. He’s going back to basics. This pumpkin bread is going to have a goddamn homey rustic touch if it kills him.

Tyson also considers icing his eyebrow, but he can’t hold the ice pack and mix at the same time, and he has priorities. Even if his priorities are probably fucked. For example, going over to Gabe’s had been a priority tonight, over cooking a nutritious dinner or watching an Oscar nominated movie or any of the one million other more productive things Tyson could have done with his time. And now his face hurts. Tyson feels strongly that this is illustrative of something about his life. He isn’t sure what, but it isn’t good. He applies himself to the dry ingredients.

It’s pretty stupid to use a big wooden spoon to mix together flour, baking soda, and pumpkin pie spice. Nothing is evenly distributed, and there are still white pockets of plain flour in the mixture after Tyson has stirred for a good minute or so. It’s not the right tool for the job, but he’s already in it. He mixes harder.

He and Gabe have only been tenuously, nebulously together for a little over a month. Their relationship isn’t supposed to be a source of stress or injury or the kind of emotional state where Tyson seeks out late-night pumpkin bread. It’s supposed to be better than their previous fuckbuddies situation. Fun, low-key, mutually beneficial. Tyson shouldn’t be making pumpkin bread over something that benefits him mutually. 

He cracks one egg, and then hits the second one so hard on the edge of the bowl that it explodes all over the counter and his hand. He breathes very deeply. Colin’s always on his ass about mindfulness and breathing techniques. The only issue is that right now he does not particularly want to be mindful.

Then again, when does he ever? Tyson has always been very resistant to self-examination, but maybe it’s time for a change. He’s probably due for a wake-up call of some kind anyway. He slops the pumpkin batter into a bread pan and listens to what he’s feeling, or whatever. His legs are hot from standing in front of the oven. His hand is sticky from egg. His face is sore from getting dropped during shower sex. Also, he finds, he’s almost kind of angry. That’s a weird one. Tyson doesn’t get angry, usually, so much as flustered or humorously frazzled. But now, he feels drained, and underneath that genuinely, slow-boiling mad. And then way, way under that is something Tyson distantly recognizes as shame. He doesn’t know why he’s angry or ashamed. This kind of experience—embarrassing and unexplainable injuries, looking foolish in front of people he’s fucking—happens to him all the time. It was inevitable. Tyson was due.

Instead of processing that, Tyson elects to set his kitchen timer—shaped like a bear, housewarming gift from Nate—and watch an episode of Tiny House Hunters. The couple has decided to raise their four kids in under 500 square feet. That’s doomed.

When the timer goes off, Tyson pulls the bread out of the oven with a flourish just for his own sense of drama. To add injury to injury, he burns himself a little on the edge of the pan as he overturns it on the cooling rack. Then to add insult to injury to injury, the bread refuses to fall nicely onto the rack. The bread goes nowhere, because Tyson forgot to grease the stupid pan. He taps it on the cooling rack over and over, runs a knife around the edges, shakes it upside down, but the pumpkin bread stays firmly and unhelpfully lodged in the pan. Tyson sets the pan on the counter with a frustrated clatter.

His burned hand hurts, his bruised eyebrow hurts, and his extremely limited dignity also hurts on top of all that, and his fucking stupid pumpkin bread won’t come out of the fucking stupid pan, and the can of Pam is sitting there right next to the stove as a taunting reminder of every other stupid thing he’s ever done in his life. He reaches out and slaps the Pam into the sink so he doesn’t have to look at it anymore, which helps for about a second and then just feels idiotic.

Tyson chips his pumpkin bread out of the pan with a spoon, and does not think about Gabe while he does it.

+

Tyson was planning to show up to practice a little early, so he could be on the ice with a visor over the increasingly ugly bruise on his eyebrow before anybody could ask any questions. He was planning on it, but there’s that quote he can’t quite remember about how the best laid plans never go right or whatever it is, and anyway he turns up to the practice facility right as the bulk of the team is still in the room.

Tyson braces himself.

“The fuck happen with your face?” Z says immediately, and he says it loud. Like they are awful sweaty solar panels and Tyson is the sun, every guy still getting dressed angles towards the two of them.

“I tripped.” 

“You tripped?” says EJ, brimming with visible glee. “How’d you trip, Big Tys? What did you trip over?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Tyson sees Gabe preemptively wince. Tyson sighs and prepares to sell it. He’s gotten injured in some incredibly dumb ways, some of which the boys know about and some of which they decidedly do not, but they’ll be happy to use their limited imaginations to fill in any blanks.

“Oh, y’know,” Tyson mutters, looking up at the ceiling to avoid eye contact. This is EJ’s weakness. Hint at the presence of an embarrassing secret and he’ll follow it like a shark scenting blood. 

EJ smiles wider, showing off all the teeth he doesn’t have. “I don’t think I do know, actually.” 

Tyson takes stock of the crowd. The D corps and a good chunk of the forwards are listening raptly, eager for a new joke. The early birds are already on the ice and G, god bless his little French self, is dutifully lacing up his skates and pretending not to listen. But aside from them, EJ’s gotten the room’s attention pretty thoroughly. This is a challenge, not for Tyson but for Gabe. Tyson’s a professional, a deflection expert. Gabe might be liable to crack.

“Well, I was in the shower,” he starts, and Gabe tenses up, freezing for just a moment with his practice jersey halfway over his head. There it is. Tyson gets a vindictive surge of happiness when he sees it, like a little internal smirk at Gabe’s expense. He doesn’t love what that reaction says about him, but he also doesn’t love this whole situation. He forges on. “And I was, uh, doing shower stuff—”

“Go on,” says EJ. “Keep it coming.”

Tyson is about to go on. He is about to keep it coming. And then he realizes, fuck. He actually doesn’t want to make a fool of himself in front of two thirds of the team. He doesn’t want to throw himself under the bus for this. He doesn’t want to commit to the bit, make the joke he was considering about jerking off, get laughed at, and get another of his embarrassing failures continually quoted back to him until the end of time or at least until the next time he gets in front of a camera and embarrasses himself even worse. His life, he realizes, has become unfortunately cyclical.

“And I fell. My face is fine, thanks for asking.” Tyson turns on his heel to face his stall, putting his back to the room and to EJ especially. EJ whistles slowly, but out of the corner of his eye Tyson can see him shrug and go back to lacing his skates.

Tyson listens to the room to determine if it’s safe to turn around. Compher mutters a half-hearted joke about life alert that falls flat given the way Tyson just murdered the mood of the room in cold blood.

Gabe claps his hands once like a kindergarten teacher. “Alright, boys, enough chit-chat. Let’s get out on the fuckin’ ice, yeah?” he yells, which Tyson doesn’t appreciate at all. Tyson tries to turn his back to both Gabe and EJ while he tapes up his socks, and is mostly unsuccessful. He can feel Gabe trying to catch his eye, so he decides to dedicate all of his energy for the next two hours to not making eye contact with Gabe and gets on the ice. 

His no-eye contact plan is going pretty well until the very end of practice, when Gabe physically corners him behind the goal as the other guys skate off. “Hey babe,” Gabe says, breathless and bright eyed, leaning forward over his stick. “Are you okay? Is your face feeling alright? Did you do a concussion screening, because I honestly think—”

“No,” says Tyson, just as a blanket statement, because he has no intention of answering any part of that barrage in more detail. Practice was almost enough to distract him from his face, replacing the embarrassment boiling in his chest with a more manageable burn in his muscles. Now Gabe’s intense desire to be bossy and feel needed is shifting that balance all around. That’s uncharitable, Tyson thinks, but probably true. His eyebrow throbs.

Gabe furrows his stately fucking brow. “What does that mean?”

“Don’t worry about it.” Tyson flaps a dismissive, sweaty glove at Gabe. He isn’t really surprised when Gabe doesn’t take that as any kind of answer. There’s a veritable canyon of concern forming in the middle of Gabe’s forehead. Tyson has never really noticed how strange and blond Gabe’s eyebrows are. They don’t make sense next to his carefully sculpted gingery stubble. Maybe Tyson should grow a beard.

“I think maybe I’ll grow a beard,” he says idly, to see how the idea feels out loud. 

“Sure, Tyson. You do that.” Gabe’s voice drips with exaggerated patience, which, Tyson realizes, is sort of the common denominator of tone whenever anybody talks to him. It stings a little. Tyson doesn’t like that he’s so used to being humored. Better to cut this off at the source, he thinks.

“Actually, fuck you, Gabe.”

“What?” Gabe asks.

“So many _questions_ all the time,” Tyson says, suddenly completely exasperated. “What, do you not trust me?”

“I’m sorry,” Gabe says, affronted. In traditional Gabe fashion, it’s less of an apology and more of an accusation. 

Tyson rolls his eyes and huffs. Tyson has always been very skilled at winding Gabe up, and vice versa, which has in the past been sexy but is currently shaping up to be pretty unpleasant.

“Oh my god,” Gabe says. “I just wanted to know if your face—”

“—An injury that you inflicted on me,” Tyson interrupts, because he thinks that’s pretty relevant to the conversation.

“I know!” Gabe exclaims, slumping dramatically against the boards. “I was there, and I feel pretty fucking bad about it, by the way, so you can stop trying to make me guilty.”

“Holy shit, you know what? Just leave me alone!” Tyson has had enough. He’s had enough and a half. It’s sort of sad that getting humiliatingly sex-injured and then lectured about it in his place of work is his breaking point, instead of something more sensible and less embarrassing. But what’s important in the end, Tyson supposes, is that he got here eventually.

“What does _that_ mean?”

“It means I’m tired of making a fool of myself,” Tyson says. The words are just falling out of him, feelings he only just became aware of basically articulating themselves. He feels a little self-righteous and very powerful. “I’m tired of everybody making me out to be a dipshit all the time, and you know what? You didn’t even apologize for fucking up my face and now nobody is ever gonna shut up about it, including you, I guess, because you can’t even take my word that I’m okay!”

“Where is this coming from?” Gabe asks. Tyson is a man of depth and maturity, and it takes everything in him not to scream in Gabe’s face and hurl his stick over the glass.

“Your dick is not so good that I can’t set boundaries, Gabe,” Tyson hisses, absolutely furious. It’s admittedly not the strongest closer. But Gabe reels backwards like Tyson just cross-checked him in the face, so he’ll go ahead and consider it a victory. “Can you just leave me alone? Can you let me deal with my own life?”

Gabe just stands there, completely silent. That’s an unusual development. Tyson chooses to interpret it as a positive. He’s done what he wanted to do.

+

On the way home, Tyson drives past the Freeway Ford, where their big LCD sign says _EVERY NEW LEVEL REQUIRES A NEW YOU!_ Tyson doesn’t know what the fuck that means.

+

Gabe likes to call rather than text, because of something about the language barrier. From what Tyson remembers of grade nine French, reading was always easier than talking and listening, but what does Tyson know? Certainly not French.

The first call Tyson gets comes in an hour after practice, after he’s already gotten home and fixed a snack and settled in. He knows that Gabe knows that he isn’t busy, because sometimes in these little snippets of post-practice time Gabe would trail him home from South Suburban and they would fuck in Tyson’s living room. Tyson almost answers the call on instinct. He’s not in the habit of screening Gabe’s calls, for obvious reasons. He’s been known to answer calls from anywhere up to and including the toilet. But then he remembers with his thumb hovering over the green button that he’s setting boundaries now, and that he’s angry, and he puts the phone down. The call goes to voicemail and Tyson goes to fish the lube out from under the couch and move it to a less embarrassing and more practical location. As a reward to himself for his maturity and restraint, he puts away the shitty rice wafers he was going to dip in his hummus and eats it with Ritz crackers instead.

The next call comes later that night. Tyson doesn’t see it, because at the time he’s out on the patio haphazardly grilling chicken breasts and shivering. When he picks his phone up off the kitchen counter and checks the call log, he sees that the second call came in exactly six hours and one minute after the first. He imagines Gabe setting an alarm, and can’t decide if that’s funny or sad. The adobo-lime marinade on the chicken didn’t turn out as flavorful as he hoped, so he has nothing to distract him.

Tyson looks at his phone as he gnaws on his chicken, idly considering the possibility that there’s some kind of emergency. Gabe didn’t leave a message, so Tyson can’t be completely sure that he hasn’t been lying in a ditch with two broken legs for the past six hours and one minute. However, Tyson has had six hours and one—now two—minutes to stew. If Gabe broke his legs, maybe he should have called the fucking trainers.

Gabe calls again at two in the morning, and Tyson is enough of a fool not to sleep with his phone on silent. In a distantly angry fugue state, he rolls over and jabs his thumb at the screen until the call connects.

“This isn’t leaving me alone, Gabe.”

“You should just come over,” Gabe says. 

“I’m not gonna do that.” Tyson rolls onto his side, pinning the phone between his ear and the pillow. The charger is pulling over his windpipe, but at this point he’s not necessarily opposed to strangulation.

“Why not? You’re not supposed to go to sleep angry.”

Tyson snorts, mashing his face further into the pillow. “Well, it’s too fucking late for that.”

Gabe coughs. “C’mon Tys. We should talk about—this. ”

“I can’t, Gabe. I just need something to be easy. Easier.”

“I don’t get it,” Gabe says. “This is easy. You’re the one making this hard.”

“Story of my life,” says Tyson.

There’s no music or chatter or background noise like Tyson would expect if Gabe were calling from a bar or something, just him breathing down the line. So Gabe is at home. Of course he’s at home, it’s two in the morning on a Monday. Even so, Tyson gets a little jolt of satisfaction that he’s not the only one home alone feeling angry and weird tonight. 

There’s a rustle on Gabe’s end, like fabric shifting. They’ve somehow never had phone sex before, Tyson realizes. Probably because they haven’t been apart for more than a day and a half since they started dating. For an impulsive and shameful second, he considers changing that. It would be easy. Gabe would jump right into the distraction. They both would.

Instead, he rolls back over so he needs his hands to press the phone to his ear, and says, “Anyway it isn’t easy for me, obviously, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Don’t call me at two in the morning.”

“I don’t understand why you’re doing this,” Gabe says. “I really think we should talk about it.”

“Go to sleep,” Tyson says back, and hangs up. He falls back asleep quicker than he thought he would.

+

Every morning Tyson wakes up and looks in the mirror while he’s brushing his teeth and some small part of him hopes that the bruise will magically have disappeared overnight. That small part is always wrong. By day four it’s stopped looking strange and tender and started looking straight up gross, a mottled swirl of vivid green right above his eyebrow.

He jabs it with his pointer finger, because it’s not like he can do more damage at this point. It still hurts. Only when he presses pretty hard, though, so that’s progress. Tyson is tired. Not really on a physical level, as he has always made a point to get at least eight hours of uninterrupted restful sleep a night. It’s tiredness somewhere deeper. He’s tired of himself, and of the situations he finds himself in. He hasn’t talked to Gabe except for that one phone call since what he is now referring to mentally as The Incident.

He drags himself to practice anyway, because it’s his job.

They’re doing breakout drills when Tyson catches an edge and eats shit, flopping on to his stomach. Ice is ice, and it happens to everybody, but Tyson digs deep into the laughing it off part of himself and comes up empty. He might have been able to pass it all off as normal if not for Gravy, who yells, “Ice is slippery today, eh, Tys?”

Any other day, he would have laughed, because that’s how things go. But Tyson is having an off day. Everyone has off days, even if Tyson’s having something of a streak.

“Shut the _fuck_ up, Graves,” Tyson snaps, and Gravy blanches and shuts the fuck up. Tyson brushes the snow off his ass and returns to the sidelines, daring anyone to look at him. He’s a wildcard now. 

Nobody makes eye contact except for EJ, who drifts over to him and props an elbow on his shoulder, in that way that’s condescending whenever anybody does it but somehow even more profoundly obnoxious when it’s EJ. Tyson swats his arm away and gets a stick to the kidney for his troubles.

“Maybe cool it,” EJ says placidly, surveying the rink. “I think you scarred Gravy for life.”

“He’s fine,” Tyson grumbles, and adds another doubt to the pile.

“I guess you’d know,” says EJ. He gives Tyson a helmet-rattling clap on the top of his head and skates away, and all Tyson can do is glare. Gravy is fine. Gabe looks over from inside a cluster of forwards, and if it were easier to flip somebody off in gloves Tyson would do it.

+

Tyson feels adrift in his own life. He’s too young for a midlife crisis, but he’s apparently not too young to nuke all of his relationships and begin to unravel on an increasingly public level. 

Maybe he just needs to make a major change. Maybe dumping Gabe wasn’t enough. Also, calling it a dumping even in his head feels itchily uncomfortable. Not that it’s an inaccurate term, just that Tyson’s not sure if he even did it on purpose. It’s unclear to him whether ignoring your partner for several days except for one cryptic, angry phone call precisely counts as a breakup. Certainly it’s changed the state of the relationship some, and probably that’s what matters.

Dating Gabe always made him sort of nervous anyway, Gabe being as beautiful and competent and lovely and Scandinavian as he is. Who is Tyson next to that? It was only inevitable that Tyson would do something troublesome and uncomfortable to ruin it.

Maybe it’s time for him to start doing Pinterest crafts. Pick some pinecones up off the ground and make decorative hedgehogs out of them. Become the kind of person who buys CBD oil from a mall kiosk. Switch it up. Based on Tyson’s understanding of his own personality, none of that would be too big of a leap.

Instead, he opens up his email and searches up the recipe Colin sent him for Insanely Healthy Vegan Oatmeal Chocolate Muffins, because he feels like punishing himself, and then he goes to fucking Natural Grocers to get flaxseed meal and carob chips, and then, just for the hell of it, he burns the muffins to a crisp. They taste like crunchy sawdust. He eats half of them still hot with his phone shoved between the couch cushions, pretending he’s the only person who exists in the world.

+

This time Gabe calls at 2:15. Tyson glares at his contact photo, which is of Gabe in Juniors with his hair shaved into a mohawk. It was the only remotely ugly photo of Gabe that Tyson could find, and he still finds it unfortunately endearing.

“Is this what we’re doing now,” Tyson asks.

“You’re the one who keeps picking up,” Gabe says.

“Couldn’t pick up if you didn’t call me.”

Gabe sighs heavily right into the phone, which translates as eardrum-crunching static on Tyson’s end. “I’m just sort of worried about you, babe,” he says, and a little flower of nervous annoyance blooms in Tyson’s chest.

“Wrong tactic, buddy,” he says, and then hangs up.

+

Tyson has both money and a little bit of sense, so he hasn’t shoveled his own driveway since he left Kelowna. But he wakes up in a sweat at six the next morning on a rare day off to see an ongoing snowstorm and thinks: why not? Sometimes Tyson just has to do something bizarre, because what else is he supposed to do? 

So he texts his plow service to cancel, pulls out the super-insulated snowboots he bought back in Cleveland, and gets to it. As it turns out, shoveling snow is difficult and unpleasant. But in the name of the new person with new hobbies he’s just now decided to become, he sticks it out until he’s cleared a strategic path exactly the width of his car.

Tyson stands in the snow-free space at the top of the driveway, looking out over his shoveled domain. He feels vaguely accomplished now that he’s completed a task that every other competent adult in the mountain west does three times a week. He’s shivering, partly from the cold and partly from the badly contained manic energy. For some reason his knees are soaking wet. He could shovel a thousand more driveways. Tyson, as a professional athlete, is very comfortable with the process of diverting all your emotional energy into pure physical sensation. He’s going to have to remember this particular method, though. He’s hardly thinking about Gabe at all.

All he has to do to keep this ball rolling is to continue shoveling, so he does. He clears the rest of the driveway, and then swings around and does the front walk and the weird little path that connects his front and back yards. The city will come plow the sidewalks eventually, so he skips that, but it’s a close call. For a moment he considers shoveling his next door neighbor’s driveway too, but he’s mostly sure that they also have a plow service that they didn’t impulsively cancel. Plus this is definitely the kind of neighborhood where an anonymous gesture of kindness is likely to end with a call to the police, and that’s not the kind of rush he’s looking for on this fine twenty-degree morning.

So instead he drives to Nate’s and goes to work on Nate’s driveway. In Tyson’s now-professional opinion, it’s too fucking long. What does Nate need so much driveway for? Tyson’s the only one who ever parks in it. Except now Tyson’s parked in the street, because he has driveway to shovel.

He’s only been at it for a few minutes when the front door opens and Nate appears. He’s still wearing the ugly cutoff flannel pants he sleeps in, which makes sense after Tyson checks his watch and realizes it’s only 8:45 in the morning. “What the fuck are you doing in my driveway?” Nate yells from the doorway.

Tyson lifts up his shovel to demonstrate. “Obviously I’m shoveling,” he yells back. “You’re welcome.”

“No, but why?”

Tyson shrugs. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, right?”

“What?” Nate bellows.

“I said don’t look a gift horse in the fucking _mouth_ ,” Tyson yells back louder. 

Nate wraps his arms around himself, stomping out of the doorway and on to the porch proper. “Did EJ tell you to do this? Did you lose a bet? Did _I_ lose a bet?”

“No, I’m just trying—” Tyson shouts, and then Nate’s looking nervously at his neighbors’ windows and Tyson is tired of yelling, so he trudges up to the porch. He almost loses his footing on a patch of ice on the way up, which only underlines the importance of having a clear and dry walkway. 

“I’m just trying to do something nice,” Tyson says once he gets to the porch, at a normal volume. Nate sighs in a cloud of white. Tyson uses the railing to knock some of the snow off his boots. “This is a nice thing people do, right? Shovel other people’s driveways?”

“I have a service for this,” Nate says, tilting his head at Tyson like a confused Pomeranian, if that Pomeranian had a multiply-broken nose. “They’re coming in, like, twenty minutes.”

Tyson shrugs. “Well, fuck.” He’s still holding the shovel, and the handle might legitimately be frozen to his hand. 

Nate uncrosses his arms so he can bury his head in his hands. “Gun show,” says Tyson idly, because this position of exasperation really shows off Nate’s biceps in the stupid too-small Mooseheads shirt he still sleeps in. Hitting on Nate is mostly habit at this point. 

“Jesus,” says Nate. “Come inside.” Tyson attempts to stab the shovel into a snowbank at the edge of the walk, which as it turns out is actually a decorative rock. The shovel skitters right off the rock, sending a reverberating shock straight up Tyson’s arm. He tries again right next to the rock, but the snow isn’t deep enough. The shovel just falls flat onto the still uncleared walk right at Tyson’s feet. He tries not to view that as a metaphor for the way his life is going. Nate shivers pointedly, opening the front door wider. “You’re letting the heat out.”

“Shut up, dad,” Tyson mutters, bending to Nate’s will as most things eventually do. Nate holds the door with his arm stretched out so that Tyson has to limbo under it. 

“Take your shoes off,” Nate says, leaving his own slides on and tracking loose snow down the front hall. “You’re making breakfast as payment for whatever crisis this is.”

“Hey now, I wouldn’t call it a crisis,” says Tyson. “Maybe I’m just trying to be a better person and give—” He tries to step out of his boots, but they’re tied too tight. “—Give, fuck! Give back to the community.” Tyson throws himself to the floor in a huff, yanking furiously at the laces of his boots until the knots unravel and he can kick them off. He kicks his left foot too hard, and the boot sails into the wall. Tyson coughs out a slightly hysterical laugh. The boot leaves a slushy smear on Nate’s eggshell finish.

Nate just looks at him.

From his spot on the floor, Tyson looks back. “I’m gonna make french toast. You better have bread or I’m fucking leaving.”

Nate doesn’t have bread. Instead he produces some kind of gluten free sprouted spelt loaf, but Tyson can still soak it in eggs and oat milk, fry it, and serve it in a puddle of the maple syrup Nate hides behind the steel-cut oats in the pantry, so he isn’t that mad about it. Tyson didn’t really want to leave anyway.

He gets lost in the motions of frying and flipping and plating. It’s almost a little meditative, especially once his hands warm up. Tyson already knows where everything is kept in Nate’s kitchen, so he mostly ignores Nate himself until Nate stops scrolling through shitty Twitter memes at the kitchen table and asks, “Coffee or orange juice?”

“Coffee, I guess,” Tyson answers.

Nate grunts in approval and starts fucking around with his Keurig. He wordlessly hands Tyson a mug. Tyson sets down the spatula, which he bought Nate as a housewarming gift, and accepts.

The coffee has an unexpected kick. “What’s in this?” Tyson asks, too strung out to be very suspicious. 

Nate takes a sip of his own coffee, hiding his face behind the mug. “Fuckton of sugar. Also, rum.”

“Oh, cool. Thanks.”

“Thought you could use some,” Nate says with an obnoxious slurp. Tyson salutes him with the mug and then downs the whole thing in two sips. The coffee’s still hot enough to burn the shit out of his mouth. Tyson considers this fair payment in exchange for having more rum in his system than before. He plates them each a pile of french toast.

The spelt bread, unsurprisingly, doesn’t fry well. “Tastes weird, bud,” Nate says after mushing his way through two full slices. He’s right. It’s somehow wet and crumbly and unpleasantly gritty all at the same time, but Tyson is determined to choke down his breakfast. If he treats it as more of a maple syrup delivery device it isn’t so bad. As long as he doesn’t try and compare it to real french toast it’s doable.

“Know what’s fucked?” Tyson says through a mouthful of syrup.

“This french toast?” Nate responds.

“Yeah, well, buy some challah and then we’ll talk. But no, I meant it’s fucked that Gabe didn’t even apologize for what he did to my face.”

Nate stops with a forkful of french toast halfway to his mouth, despite the shit he was just talking. “What did Gabe do?”

“Oh, did I not tell you?” Tyson asks. “We were fucking in his shower and he dropped me. That’s what this is from.” Tyson gestures at the fading bruise and wipes his mouth with a paper towel. “That’s also why we’re not talking right now. I might have broken up with him but I’m not a hundred percent on that.” Nate drops his head into his hands.

Tyson had sort of hoped that it would all be less embarrassing once he said it out loud, but that does not seem to be the case. It’s not humiliating that he said it to Nate in particular, because Nate is basically Tyson’s diary. Nate knows every humiliating thing there is to know about Tyson, and there has historically been a lot there. But it turns out that his whole situation is still acutely stupid and confusing and unpleasant.

“Maybe I’ll go,” Tyson says.

“Oh my god,” Nate groans. He gets up from the table without clearing the dishes or making eye contact with Tyson and fixes two fresh mugs of rum coffee.

“Do you not even have creamer?” Tyson asks. Tyson knows he has creamer, some non-dairy sugar-alternative garbage that Tyson doesn’t even really want in his coffee.

Nate glares in his direction. “You don’t get any creamer,” he says. “You won’t appreciate it.”

Tyson appreciates dairy and sugar in all forms except _substitute_ , so Nate is probably right, but routine demands that he keep pushing. “Maybe I’ll just go over to Willy’s. He’d make me a fancy latte with real milk and thank me for openly expressing my experience of sexuality.” Dinner with Colin is always an eye opening experience. Tyson goes in with a problem and comes out with some kind of metaphysical yoga-based solution that does some minor damage to his hip flexors and lets him leave feeling temporarily cleansed.

“Shut the fuck up,” Nate says, carrying both creamerless coffees past Tyson into the living room. “You don’t want turmeric, you wanna complain.” 

As always, Nate is at least eighty percent right about Tyson’s feelings. Tyson follows him into the living room to go sit on the couch. More specifically, Tyson full-body reclines on the couch and Nate sits on the floor in front of him and passes up a mug. His new mug says ‘Hockey Mom: Don’t Puck With Me’ on the side, and he desperately wants to know where Nate got it.

Nate shifts around on the floor, getting comfortable. He leans a shoulder heavily into the cushion under Tyson’s thigh, takes a deep sip of his coffee, and says, “Alright, go for it.” Nate has always had an unfussy and comforting presence, much like how Tyson imagines other people’s dads.

Tyson rolls onto his back so he doesn’t have to look Nate in the eye, balancing the mug on his stomach. “You know that quote that’s like, insanity is doing something ninety nine times and expecting something different on the hundredth shot?”

Nate leans back, bouncing the back of his head off Tyson’s knees. “Nope.”

“Fuck, you’re a dumbass.” He should make a joke there, so it comes off less mean. He doesn’t.

“Don’t be a bitch, Tys,” Nate responds flatly.

Tyson sighs. “Sorry, sorry. Whatever, you know it now.” He drags a sweaty hand down his face. On the ceiling above him, the smoke detector blinks red. The hockey mom mug is too hot in his hand. “I feel like I’m that idiot in the quote. Just running into the same wall a thousand times like something’s gonna change the next time I do it, and then nothing changes, and then I do it again anyway.”

“Practice makes perfect, I guess?” That’s such an incredibly Nate thing to say that Tyson almost laughs. As though there’s no problem in the world that can’t be fixed through coached repetition and targeted focus on specific muscle groups. As though if Tyson only adjusted his macros the right way, his behavior would start to make sense to himself and others. Like if he applied himself to plyometric training he’d stop being such an incredible asshole.

“Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be coming through for me.”

“That sucks.”

“Yeah. Sure does.” Tyson sighs and takes a sip of his coffee. It’s still a little too hot. “I’m just tired of it. Tired of my own shit, you know?”

Nate nods. The shaved part of his hair scratches against the seam of Tyson’s pants. Tyson drops a heavy hand on his head in a half-hearted facewash that’s really more of a head rub.

“I was originally talking about Gabe,” Tyson says.

“I know,” says Nate.

“But it turns out the problem is a little bit bigger, I think.”

Nate nods again slowly under Tyson’s hand. He smells like maple syrup. They both do.

“You aren’t supposed to agree.”

“Whoops, sorry.”

Tyson spills a little bit of coffee on himself and Nate’s couch simultaneously, because it’s fucking hard to drink out of a mug when you refuse to sit up. “God, how does anybody put up with me?”

“I don’t put up with you,” says Nate. “I actually like you.”

“Again, that was rhetorical. Read the room, buddy.” Nate has to say that because he’s Tyson’s protege, and Tyson bought him the stain remover stick that at some point today Tyson will have to use to get spiked coffee out of his shirt collar. 

Tyson stays on Nate’s couch and drinks Nate’s rum for long enough to feel guilty about the sheer volume of dishes he created with the french toast. One of his great virtues is that he is a drunk cleaner. If he could dig up more virtues, that would be great, but in the meantime he tipsily scrubs all of Nate’s frying pans.

+

January becomes February and the team can’t buy a win. Now the sign at the Freeway Ford says _YOU NEVER FAIL UNTIL YOU STOP TRYING!_ Tyson, stuck in traffic, does not care for that at all.

+

Tyson had sort of forgotten, in the rush of it all, that he and Gabe used to hang out besides fucking. Of course Tyson is close with a bunch of the guys on the team and on other teams. He has a full and active social life. But Gabe, as it turns out, was a bigger part of that than he thought. Tyson’s lonelier now, and hornier, but now he has more time to invest in personal reflection. That has to count for something. He really needs it to count. He cannot and will not miss Gabe, because that’s a recipe for disappointment and disaster.

He walks into their game against the Canucks with Colin. Really it’s less of a walk and more of a lock-kneed shuffle across the black ice in the parking lot.

“Fuck,” Tyson says once they’re safely on dry ground inside. “I wish they’d put down more salt.”

“Actually, I don’t love what all the magnesium chloride does to the watershed,” Colin says. Tyson has no goddamn idea what that means. It reminds him of high school chemistry, which was definitely the last time he heard the word ‘chloride’ in any context. Colin goes on to say something thoughtful about trout habitat in the Platte, but Tyson is thinking of the only fact he actually remembers from chemistry class: that, because of something about atoms or molecules or electric currents, nothing ever actually touches anything else.

Of course all that scientific molecule bullshit doesn’t help at all when he physically bumps into Gabe in the hallway outside the change room. Tyson drops his water bottle. Gabe drops his phone. Tyson wishes for death.

Gabe offers up a legitimately unattractive grimace-smile. “Oops.” 

Tyson shrugs despite the stress-induced tightness in his shoulders. “Haha. Oops.” There it is again: shame. This is the first time they’ve interacted outside of the uncomfortable bare minimum of being on the same team in days. Tyson gets a sharp, lightning bolt spike of sadness in his chest. Before Tyson started burning bridges, Gabe might have grabbed his shoulder to steady him. He might have turned it into a hug, because one of Gabe’s little-known strengths is that he’s a great hugger. There might have been a lighthearted, flirtatious joke made about the situation. Instead, Tyson blushes and tries his hardest to teleport down the hall.

They lose the game, badly. Gabe calls again that night. Tyson doesn’t even consider sending it to voicemail.

“Good evening, Gabe.”

“Hi, Tys.”

“Have you ever wondered what the absolute opposite of a booty call is?”

“I haven’t, no,” says Gabe, sounding suspicious.

Tyson turns over in bed and watches the clock on his nightstand tick over from 2:08 to 2:09. “It’s this. This experience is the opposite of a booty call.”

“Thank you for the input. I’ll keep that in mind next time you’re in crisis,” Gabe says. “Note to self: make it sexier.”

“Fuck, what do you people think a crisis is,” Tyson says. A car drives past outside, momentarily lighting up Tyson’s bedroom ceiling. “I swear to God, if everybody keeps acting like I’ve lost my mind I’m actually gonna lose my mind.”

“Fine, Tys, than what is this?”

“I just wanna feel like a real person, you know? I wanna be a real person.” He sighs heavily, and hopes it sounds horrible on Gabe’s end.

“I, uh, don’t think I do know,” says Gabe.

Tyson scoffs. “Well, of course _you_ don’t.”

“Fine, explain it to me. What about you isn’t real?”

It’s two in the morning, and Tyson can barely explain it to himself. “Fuck, I don’t know. I want to be somebody that other people take seriously, but instead I’m just ridiculous. I’m a ridiculous person.”

“You aren’t ridiculous.”

“Shut up, Gabe. Name one time you’ve taken me seriously.” 

Gabe goes frustratingly, tellingly silent. If Tyson has to sit through one more meaningful silence, in which Gabe obviously flounders in the face of Tyson’s sheer dumbfuckery, he’s going to start screaming and he won’t stop screaming. His neighbors will think he’s being murdered, because Gabe is in some way murdering him slowly.

“I just wanna turn this around,” Tyson says instead of shrieking like he wants to. Tyson acknowledges that wordlessly screaming is not going to resolve this situation. “I want—I need some time to do that.”

“I just don’t get what you’re trying to do here.”

“Noted,” says Tyson. This conversation is chasing its tail, like one of those snakes that eats itself. “I mean, I feel like I’ve been pretty clear. What are you not understanding?”

“I miss you.”

Tyson decides to try the silence trick, because there’s no other way he can respond to that non sequitur and still keep the high ground.

“I really am sorry about your face, by the way. I should have apologized.” Gabe sounds deeply sincere, and Tyson simply does not have the capacity to handle that right now. 

“You really should have,” Tyson says, ungraciously.

“You don’t have to be snooty about it.”

“You don’t have to be such a dick all the time,” Tyson snaps, and hangs up. He doesn’t regret doing it a second later, but the remorse kicks in after about three. If this doesn’t count as breaking up, Tyson genuinely isn’t sure what does. Gabe probably won’t call again, in the middle of the night or otherwise. Technically speaking, that’s what Tyson has wanted all along.

+

Tyson’s on his phone, watching a looping video of disembodied hands making one monstrous cinnamon roll out of other, smaller cinnamon rolls. He considers trying it, but he doesn’t really feel like going to the link in bio. He doesn’t really feel like doing anything productive, but his bruise is almost gone, so it’s probably time to rejoin society somehow.

As Tyson likes to do when he’s in need of distraction, he goes to T.J. Maxx Homegoods for a restorative hour or two of touching throw pillows and smelling discount liquid hand soaps. Anyway, he’s in the market for something new to put on his mantle, because the modular candle holder thing he’s had up there is starting to feel a little stale. 

The T.J. Maxx chaos is familiar and soothing. As always, there are mountains of pillows waiting to be knocked over and all of the soap bottles are slightly, inexplicably, greasy to the touch. Tyson does a circuit and finds a decorative silver antler thing to replace the candle holder, and also a new laundry hamper.

He joins the checkout line, idly running his hand along one of the shelves of impulse purchase junk, tossing a bag of shelf stable macadamia nut cookies into his cart. Really it’s here, among all the other regular people buying shit they don’t need, that Tyson feels most like a person. There’s nothing he can fuck up here, because everything here is already a little fucked up. He imagines trying to explain that to Gabe. He pictures the way Gabe would raise a skeptical eyebrow, the way he always does when Tyson says something that objectively, incredibly dramatic. They would elbow each other, and then as punishment Tyson would make him buy one of the crappy portable chargers on display in the checkout line to teach him a lesson about the poetry of consumption. This is getting maudlin. Tyson doesn’t want to wallow.

Right there under those cheap portable chargers, there’s a plastic cactus in a little pot that says _My life would succ without you_. It’s the dumbest thing Tyson has ever seen in his life. He hates it on an immediate, instinctive level.

“Fucking Christ,” says Tyson. The lady in front of him in line has a kid in her cart, and she turns around to scowl at him. “Sorry,” he says, “But do you see this?” He waves a frantic hand at the cactus. The lady does not engage. Tyson wouldn’t engage with himself either if he had the choice. 

Tyson picks up the cactus to feel its dusty little weight in his hand. He’s never seen anything more unbearable. Tyson’s life has sucked variously with and without a whole bunch of people, but he’s never felt the need to own a fake cactus about it. When he turns it over three of its bristly plastic spines come off in his palm. The price tag on the bottom says $5.68. He puts it in his cart, mostly so nobody else will have to see it. 

Or that’s what Tyson tells himself until he gets home, takes the cactus out of the bag, puts it on the kitchen table, and slumps down far enough in a chair that it’s at eye level.

The cactus feels significant. He loves the cactus, he hates the cactus. It makes him think, suddenly and undesirably, of Gabe and of Tyson’s life with and without him. That thought stops Tyson in his tracks. He wants to stop thinking of it immediately, so he sends a picture of the cactus to Colin. Colin is the only person he can trust to have a similar perspective on interior design, so it seems like the move.

 _What IS that_ , Colin sends back.

 _Exactly what it looks like_ , Tyson says. His phone rings immediately, and he answers because it’s a reasonable hour and not Gabe calling.

“Did you _buy_ that?” Colin asks on the other end.

“Of fucking course I did,” Tyson says. “I couldn’t process my feelings about it while I was in the checkout line. I had to do it.”

“What feelings?” Colin says, laughing. “How could that possibly inspire feelings?”

“God, what feelings didn’t it inspire? I got so many fucking feelings right now and I can’t deal with _any_ of ‘em”

“Huh,” says Colin. “Hey, are you busy this afternoon? Want to come to my house?”

“If I come over, will you make me a turmeric latte?”

Colin hums. “What are your thoughts on beetroot?”

“You can’t make me.”

“It’s pink,” Colin says, singsong.

“I’m not that easily bought,” Tyson says. “Beets taste like dirt and if you put them in a drink, that drink isn’t a latte anymore. It’s soup. It’s borscht.”

“You have to bring your own coconut milk. I’m almost out.”

“Fine,” Tyson says, and stops for a can of coconut milk on the way.

+

Tyson almost falls again on Colin’s icy front walk. Only a fortuitously placed lamppost keeps him from launching the coconut milk into space and breaking his tailbone. “No salt, I see,” he says to Colin as he lets himself in the front door.

“You know it,” Colin says, taking the can of coconut milk and Tyson’s coat. “Now I’m going to make you a beetroot latte and you’re gonna like it.” 

“Fuck off,” says Tyson, but Colin bustles off into the kitchen to steam some milk. Tyson knows that Colin won’t let him help, so he makes himself comfortable in the breakfast nook. There’s an actual living, blooming succulent in the middle of the table. The whole room smells like pine and incense, but in a way that doesn’t immediately give Tyson a headache, which is the magic of the Wilson household.

Colin sets down the stupid pink latte in front of him and sits down across the table. The latte is beautiful and smells delicious, and Tyson has to physically restrain himself from taking a picture of it. It exactly matches the color of the blossom on the little cactus on the table. He takes a sip, and it does not taste like borscht.

“Is it good?” Colin asks. It’s physically impossible for Colin to look smug, because he’s too self-actualized and hides it too well. But Tyson can almost hear a little gloating in his voice.

“God, too good for me,” Tyson groans. He takes another sip, which is even better than the first. 

“You deserve nice things, y’know,” Colin says mildly.

“I know that,” says Tyson. “I love nice things. This hoodie is cashmere. Each individual ingredient in this latte cost five dollars.”

“Okay, let me rephrase,” says Colin, settling further into his chair. “You can have nice _situations_ , and stability, and interpersonal experiences that make you happy.”

Tyson narrows his eyes. That’s fighting words. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Colin just stares at him with his enormous, soulful eyes. He takes a pointed sip of his own latte without breaking eye contact with Tyson. It’s like looking at a majestic elk who is also a therapist and a Buddhist monk. Tyson breaks. “Come on, there’s no such thing as stability in my life. I’m like a magnet for bizarre, stupid circumstances.” He moves his mug one inch to the left. It leaves a hot wet ring on the table’s butcher block surface. “No, wait, let me revise that. I make bizarre, erratic decisions that result in stupid, unstable circumstances. Accountability is important.”

“You doing erratic shit is a big part of the charm, Tys. If I wanted to have a completely normal time I’d call up Soda more often,” Colin says. 

“See, that’s the thing,” says Tyson, sidestepping the dunk on Soda entirely. “People only like me because I entertain them. I mean, Nate likes me because I imprinted on him young, and you like me because we have the same tastes, but beside that.”

Colin’s forehead crumples. “Variety is the spice of life?”

“Don’t bullshit me.”

Colin sets down his mug and leans forward across the table. “Tyson, I’m not bullshitting at all when I say that you have the best energy of anyone I know.” Tyson grimaces, but he knows that’s the sincerest possible thing that Colin could say. Colin pokes him in the chest for emphasis. “People genuinely love you, and you aren’t allowed to disagree or I won’t make you another latte.”

The latte is down to cooling dregs already. Tyson respects that for the threat it is. “I can and will break out the self-love mantras,” Colin says, leaning back in his chair. “You know I have them, I’ve got a whole note on my phone.”

Tyson thinks. He’s been operating under the assumption that most people are just putting up with him. Or, to be more specific, that Gabe is just putting up with him. In the name of mutual horniness, or convenience, or habit.

“‘I love myself,’” Colin recites, reading off his phone. “‘I am worthy of good things.’” 

In retrospect, that assumption probably does both of them a disservice. Tyson’s good energy aside, Gabe didn’t have to fuck him. Gabe didn’t have to ask him if they could be something more. Gabe didn’t have to try his goddamn hardest to date him even as Tyson and his insecurities fought him every step of the way and ditched at the first sign of trouble and humiliation. 

“‘It’s okay to pursue things that bring me joy and happiness.’” Colin looks up. “Is it working yet?”

“Maybe,” says Tyson.

“Okay, I’ll keep going. ‘I am capable of making good decisions and acting in my own best interest.’”

“Am I, though?” Tyson asks.

Colin puts his phone down and makes that devastating eye contact again. “I think you can be.”

“Well, shit,” Tyson huffs. “Can I have another latte now?”

+

That night Tyson calls Gabe. At 9, which is a reasonable hour for making phone calls and which will not disrupt anyone’s sleep schedule. Actually, first he texts both Nate and Colin saying _Affirm me!!!_ And then, after Nate responds _U r great tbear_ and Colin responds _Affirm yourself, I didn’t read you all those mantras for nothing_ , he calls Gabe.

It’s only after he hits call that he starts to feel weird about the prospect of speaking to Gabe sitting up in a chair with the lights on. He let himself get used to the bubble of exhausted unreality that the late night calls created. But then it’s too late to reconsider, because the call connects and Gabe says, “Tyson?” with a guarded hope in his voice that makes Tyson a little ashamed.

“Guess what I bought today,” Tyson says.

There’s a pause, during which he can hear Gabe breathing. “Tyson, I don’t—groceries?”

“No, I bought a cactus,” Tyson says. He reaches out and taps the cactus where it’s sitting on a coaster in front of him. It’s still awful. Another spine comes off when he touches it. “Not a real one, a fake one. The ugliest, most ridiculous little fake cactus you’ve ever seen in your life.”

“You’re really painting me a picture, Tys,” says Gabe, and Tyson exhales in relief because, after all this, Gabe has maintained the uncontrollable urge to bicker. That can only be a promising sign.

“Yeah, and you will not believe what it says on the pot. It says ‘ _my life would succ without you.’_ That’s succ with two C’s, like succulent.”

“No way,” says Gabe.

“Yeah,” Tyson says, “It’s the worst thing in the world. I don’t understand how it got produced.” 

Gabe snorts. Tyson gets a brief and familiar shimmer of happiness from making Gabe laugh, which is probably a feeling he should have paid attention to sooner. It might be a feeling that says something about him.

“Why are you calling, Tyson?” Gabe is saying his name too much, and it’s throwing him off. He looks at the cactus and refocuses.

“I’ve recently realized,” he says, “that I may have been lashing out, and I’ve maybe been a little bit of a dick.”

Gabe doesn’t say anything, so Tyson keeps talking. “Not a little bit. I’ve just been a dick, straight up. To you and potentially others.”

“What does this have to do with the cactus?”

His self preservation instinct kicks in at just the right time, so instead of revealing the unbearably vulnerable truth that the cactus made him think about their relationship, Tyson just says, “I was just using the cactus to break the ice. Don’t worry about it.” 

“I might go ahead and worry.”

“Come over,” says Tyson. “I’m gonna make cookies.”

“What?”

“You heard me.” Tyson hangs up and goes to get the peanut butter and chocolate chips out of the pantry. He has time to make the dough, eat some of the dough, and get the first sheet of cookies in and out of the oven before Gabe knocks on his front door. He knows it’s Gabe because any other person who might come to his house unannounced at 9:30 at night would already have tried the knob and let themselves in. Tyson shoves a hot cookie in his mouth for strength and goes to open the door.

“What kind of cookies are they?” Gabe asks on the doorstep. He’s wearing an absolutely enormous scarf that makes it look like his head is floating on a cloud of maroon knit.

“Come try them and see,” Tyson says through a mouthful of crumbs. A few of the crumbs fly out of his mouth and land in the weave of Gabe’s scarf. “Oh, gross, sorry.”

Gabe shrugs, dislodging the scarf, and comes inside. Tyson points at the shoe rack, a previous HomeGoods purchase. “Take your shoes off, slush is terrible for the hardwoods.”

“I was just going to,” Gabe grumbles. “There’s not even slush on them anyway. I literally only walked from your driveway to your door.” Tyson knows very well that there’s no slush on his driveway, but it’s the principle of the thing.

It’s fortunate that Gabe showed up before the second batch of cookies got in the oven. Tyson is going to need something to do with his hands, and scooping cookie dough onto the baking sheet will work just fine. Gabe kicks his shoes off and follows Tyson into the kitchen. “Take a cookie,” Tyson says, pointing to the rack where they’re cooling.

Gabe does as he’s told. “So,” he says, crunching on a cookie. There is no follow up to the ‘so.’ Apparently this is Tyson’s show now, which seems fair given the circumstances.

Unfortunately, he can’t think of anything to say that’s either helpful or unrelated to the cookies. “They’re peanut butter chocolate chip,” he says. “If you couldn’t tell.”

“I could tell,” Gabe says, leaning against the island right next to Tyson’s cookie assembly line. “They’re good.” If Tyson were actively trying to bake cookies instead of just fucking around to distract himself, Gabe would be in the way. As is, Tyson prefers this to him being further away.

“Is your eye feeling better? I really am so sorry about that,” Gabe says suddenly, all in one breath like he’s desperate for an answer.

“My eye?” Tyson says, surprised. He’s been so embroiled in his own brain that he forgot about his eye. “It hasn’t hurt for a couple of days, it’s fine. Were you still worried about that?”

Gabe reaches out and grabs another cookie, then snaps it in half. “Yeah, I was worried. It seemed like I really fucked up with that. I was gonna say I’ll be more careful in the future, but.” He shrugs, breaking the cookie halves into fourths and then eighths and then inedible crumbles on his fingertips.

“Don’t waste cookies,” Tyson says, moving the cooling rack away to give himself time to gather his thoughts. “Eat them or don’t.” 

“Fine,” says Gabe. He brushes the crumbs into the sink and scarfs down a new cookie in two bites. “Happy?”

“Yeah, I am.” Tyson eats a spoonful of cookie dough to help him think. It doesn’t help any, so he just resolves to do what he does best and speak without thinking. “Also, don’t worry about the eye. It wasn’t really about the eye anyway.”

“What was it about?”

“Well, it did suck in the moment. And I would appreciate you not dropping me again, going forward.” Gabe’s shoulders relax just a little bit when Tyson says that. It feels good to Tyson too, to acknowledge a future like that, even if it’s just something small and foolish like putting a moratorium on shower sex. “But I’m so used to doing weird stuff and setting myself back by accident. And then that happened, and it really seemed like a setback, and I freaked out.”

The low, warm hum of the oven fills up all the negative space in the kitchen.

Tyson takes a deep breath in through his nose and out through his mouth and says, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” says Gabe, too quickly.

“Nah, let me finish,” Tyson says. “I took my shit out on you, and I shouldn’t have. Insecurity is a bitch, whatever. Anyway. Sorry. Please take me back.”

Gabe looks taken aback. “What? Did we break up? Were we broken up?”

“Shit, I kind of thought so,” Tyson says, putting the dough scoop down. It rattles in the mostly empty mixing bowl.

“No way.” Gabe shakes his head. “No taking you back. Nowhere to take you.”

Tyson’s heart sinks. There was always the possibility that he actually did break something irreparable. They haven’t been together that long. “Oh, okay.”

“Wait, I mean no taking you back as in, you’ve always been here? What I’m trying to say is I don’t want to break up with you, and I don’t want to just fuck you. I want to spend time with you and be around you and be dating you. That’s what I want. I don’t know, English isn’t my first language.” 

“You can’t use that as an excuse,” Tyson says fondly, reassured. “When was the last time you spoke Swedish?” 

“I mean, I call my mom sometimes.” Gabe shrugs. “She was wondering how you were.”

Tyson gives up on maturity and distance and self-preservation and leans into Gabe’s side. “Fuck, I missed you.” He didn’t want to, and he tried hard not to, and he thought it would be easier if he didn’t, but it happened anyway. This is better.

Gabe wraps an arm around him. “I missed you too, but you knew that already.”

“I’m sorry I was slower than you to realize.”

“It’s cool. I’m just glad you got here eventually.” Gabe kisses his temple, which is the kind of deeply romantic shit that Tyson didn’t even remember that he was missing.

“Well,” Tyson says, wiping some excess cookie dough on his pants, “first fight is done. Glad that’s over with.”

“Oh my God,” Gabe laughs. “You bounce back quick.”

“I’ve recently been told that I’m worthy of good things and capable of making good decisions, so I’m leaning into that.”

Gabe just buries his face in the crook of Tyson’s neck and laughs into his skin. “Hey, you wanna go to bed?” Tyson asks, eying the oven timer.

Gabe looks up. “Can we bring the cookies? They’re really very good.”

“Of course we’re bringing the cookies, who the fuck do you think I am?” Tyson grabs the cooling rack and leaves the dishes and mess behind, leading Gabe upstairs with an arm around his waist. He can clean the rest up in the morning.

**Author's Note:**

> brought to you by the inspirational freeway ford, tyson barrie's lava cake recipe, and that one athletic article where colin wilson talks about how much he loves tys. this was planned on fiona apple written on lizzo and edited on say yes to the dress, which hopefully explains the tone.
> 
> come say hey on [tumblr](http://softbarrie.tumblr.com)!


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